My Course Sucks

0:00My course sucks, and I know it. I've known it for a while. I built my first course for some university back all the way back in 2017. And while almost no one has complained that the course sucks, which is a testament to how good I did it the first time, I believe it sucks because it's been almost 10 years since I've updated it. We've only added like one extra lesson to the course. And you might be thinking, why are you even doing like, why are you even worried about this? You know, our course is even a thing anymore. I hear that a lot. And the truth is, is like, yes, they're very much still a thing. And I think that my audience isn't fatigued on courses the way, say you and I are, because you know we're in the industry. And here's the there's a there's an inherent problem

1:01with the course model or the education model, which is the model that I'm in. And the problem is is that once someone takes the course, we don't have any other things to sell them. We don't have any other courses. Now, if you are a like a college or a or a or any type of school, like you graduate, that's sort of the point. And I'm kind of leaning in on this as an idea as actually a marketing tactic, because I do want people to graduate. I want part of what I was thinking and I was telling Steph this when we were designing this whole new course thing. She said, like, what's like, why are we updating it? Like, what are we trying to get at, like, how is this different from our YouTube videos? Because we're going to get to ask that question a lot. Like, you know, we post YouTube videos every single week. We've been doing it for many, many years. You can go

2:01get a free education on YouTube with all of our videos. Here's what I think. And I don't this is not for everybody. There are certain things are certain industries where the, the user has an insatiable appetite for content. If, like, if I'm talking about home brewing, you know, I would take classes every single month for the rest of my life. I always want to learn stuff. There's always something new to learn. And I'm okay learning something I already know again, just from a different perspective. This is not the case for pool care. With the way I see it. And it's just, you know, this would be true for pond care as well. Like, I have ponds and all of pools. But for pond care, yes, there are some people. I think they're fairly rare. There are some people who are into it as a hobby. There are some people who take care of their pools and they're kind of into it, right? They're into the water testing. They're into the, the whole

3:04thing. I think they're so, so, so, so, so, so rare. And the majority of people are like, yo, I just want to get my pool clear so that my kids can swim in it and stop yelling at me. I just want to go swimming. I don't want to have to worry about this damn thing. Why is this always a problem for me? Why did I even get a pool? Why did I move into a house with a pool? It's a friggin nightmare. So here's my, my belief is that there are, yes, while there's some people who are into it, most people just want it done. And so when the sales pitch for the course is, how is it different than our YouTube videos? It's different in that when you take our course, you'll never have to watch another YouTube video over again. Ah, that's pretty interesting. We're basically saying you do this. This is the shortcut. Yes, you can go on YouTube. Yes, you can watch all of our stuff. It's totally free. It's going to take you forever to figure it out. And

4:08you're not going to have anybody to ask. And you're just going to have to like build your own curriculum and, and like learn as you go. And that's completely fine. Or you could spend the money, learn everything in one sitting, master it, and then never have to look at this YouTube again. I think that's a pretty compelling offer. It's like a one in done thing. And it's fairly cheap, comparatively to courses. You know, we're not selling a, you know, I know there's people that sell thousands, like $20,000 courses and stuff. We're not doing that. You know, $5,000 courses. We're like a hundred bucks, dude. All right. 100 bucks. You know, you take care of your pool. Maybe maybe we're underpriced. I'm, we might be. I'm willing to bet that we are with that, with that sales model, with that, with that pitch is like, yo, you want this shit solved? Watch this and it'll be solved. You'll be done. Okay. So here's, so well,

5:11that said, we now have kind of expand it. We're kind of looking, we've, we've kind of cross business models. We have our education model, right, where it's a one in done. You kind of graduate, you buy our book, you buy our course, that's it. But we have this, now that we have this other SaaS layer that we're working on to sort of, you know, pick up the, the, the long tail of the business. And what's interesting is it's like, I guess the good news is that we've been in this for a while. So like for 30 years, or really for, I mean, I've been doing it for 30 years, but 20 years from universities exist it. I mean, we've, we're kind of, we're kind of the only game in town. And so I feel like there's something to that. Anyway. Here's why I believe my course currently sucks. One, like I mentioned, we haven't posted anything new. We did one new lesson. It's not that great.

6:15But we haven't posted a new lesson in close to 10 years. It's the same 35-ish videos. And that's it. In fact, the other reason is that our YouTube channel is better right now. But it's less organized because we just post whenever, whenever, or what, you know, any topic that we decide, okay, let's publish this. We just publish it. We don't put things in the playlists. You know, we could, but it's not built like a course. They're just built like individual videos. And they don't have any strong recommendations. In fact, a lot of what we do in our YouTube videos is we are, we're sort of, we're more diplomatic. We're more like, here are all your options. You know, have at it. Here's what you need to know. And so our YouTube content is technically better because it's newer.

7:17It's more vague. And I think that our course can be way more opinionated because our book is also like, not one say vague. You know what I mean? But we don't, we don't recommend chemicals like a hard like, Hey, buy this brand or we recommend this robotic cleaner. We love this one. And the reason we don't do that is because obviously that shit changes all the time. And we don't have it. We don't have the ability to test that stuff. So it would be disingenuous if I were to say that anyway. But in our videos, like people ask us like, you know, how do saltwater pools work? That's fairly generic. We talk about that in our course. Here is specifically how we think you should take care of your pool to save a ton of money and save a ton of time. So it's very sort of opinionated in how I want you to take care of your pool because I've thought about this. And if, you know, it's like, basically,

8:19the idea would be like, if I had a pool, here's how I do it to basically, you know, optimize the shit out of it. The onboarding for YouTube sucks, right? Because there's no onboarding. You just find a video and you're like, yeah, hope they keep going. Our course, we don't have any onboarding. There's no emails that go out after you buy the course to kind of get you started. There's no progress emails that go out. There's no, you know, there's no like videos that kind of help you walk through it. There's no, there's no onboarding whatsoever. Currently. And finally, I think there needs to be some written content and our course is all video. There needs to be content that if you want to watch it, if you want to take notes, if you want to take a quiz, if you want to get a certificate, like there's,

9:20there needs to be like physical stuff. So here's how I plan to fix this. We have been slowly, since we've been, since we've had this course, we've been surveying the audience. We've been getting feedback and we've been just collecting it for, I don't know, probably the last like four years. Not, you know, so we just, we have this course. People still buy it. We don't actively promote it. We don't promote it in any of our emails. We don't promote it on our website, really. But, you know, you can buy it. And so it is, it is for sale. People do buy it. People do like it. But they also ask questions. They have comments within the course. And we collect any sort of feedback. Up, we're missing that. Up, we could do that better. Okay. And we've been collecting this in a sauna for again, like four years. So that's the first step, figuring out where the holes are in our current curriculum.

10:22And then building a curriculum from scratch, scrapping, basically ignoring what we did in the first course, and just building it from scratch. We're going to create different types of video formats that feel more authentic. So the thing that separates our YouTube videos from our course is that the course is me talking directly to you. It's a more casual, relaxed, relaxed experience. It's got more, it's like, I wouldn't, I would say it's not slower. It's just more, I wouldn't even, it's, it's very optimized. And modular. And it's much more like, here's what we think you should do. Here's, and then let's take a look at this. Let's, let's dive deep into it. It's less trying to hook you,

11:25which is what our YouTube videos do. They're hooky, they're listicles. It's, this is not like that. Each lesson is very, very specific. And we're creating more lessons that we had in the course. So if the course, the original one had like 35 lessons, this is probably going to be close to double. So it's, it's a lot of, it's a lot of lessons. But we're going to, we're going to create better modules. And the reason for doing more lessons, but maybe the videos are a little shorter is so that you can kind of jump around. You're not like, you know, what I, what I realized as a course taker in, in recent years is that man, I really hate when there's like an hour long video. Because if I'm trying to learn one specific thing, because sometimes like, for instance, I jumped into this course, it was a video editing course that I just wanted to peruse because I wanted to see how they edited something. And it took me all day, like scrubbing through videos

12:29to find the one thing I was looking for. And it happened to be in a quiz video, which I didn't even look in. And it was an hour and a half long video. And I had to scrub through. And I finally found it. And I was like, Oh my God. There was nobody to ask. It was just like, so I feel like the lessons need to be more specific so that you can look at it and go, Oh, yeah, I need to learn about this thing. And then that video is like five, 10 minutes. And it's like, you're getting like the, it's all chapter based. It's like very tight. We also want to do more downloads. So more things that you can download to help you track your pool, take care of your pool, you know, dosing charge, cheat sheets, profile things, you know, all kinds of stuff. So we're going to work on doing that. And then finally, another thing that I really want to do, and this may be a price

13:34increase or this may be why we do this. I don't know. I'm not against the idea. But we go, okay, what if we were to, so we're doing these live monthly webinars. Now currently, I am giving that to everybody. I'm just like making it for everyone. But not everybody can join because there's a limit. But what do you do with those videos afterwards? We don't just give them to everybody, because then that would defeat the purpose of doing webinar. But I would give them to people in the course. And so we could start to build up a monthly library of webinars where people can ask questions. And there may be just Q and A webinars. So this is just more content we can add to the course. And yeah, I'm, the more you think about this, the more I'm like, we are definitely underpriced. Because let's, I mean, I'm thinking, yeah, if, if you can

14:40solve all of your pool problems by taking one course, maybe it's just like one, maybe it's like a couple of weeks of your life where you're like, it's the middle of summer, you're taking this course, you know, you take it at night, you take notes. I don't think you really need quizzes personally. Some people want, you know, a certificate at the end, especially if they're a pool person, you know, they just want that certificate to say like, hey, I'm certified by some university. I think we need to do that. And I think we need to promote that. And that can be a B to B thing. I think by making the course more expensive, we're also sending a message that's like, hey, we spent a lot of time on this. This is kind of the only thing you need. It's like basically what we're, what we're trying to say is, you take this course and you'll never have to fucking worry about your pool again. Because you'll know what to do. It's not that complicated. And having sort of like, you know, maybe there's like a, like the

15:46live webinar thing is, is, is good every once in a while. We constantly promote those things to keep people involved in the course. It's constantly new content. Maybe every once in a while, we do a Q and A webinar for people who own the course. And I kind of feel like that's, that's a good deal. And I don't know what the price is. Right now, we charge 149 for the course. I think it could easily go to 199. And it could probably go up higher than that. It could probably go to like 299, honestly. Depends on how much we, I think we put into it. And there's a threshold in which people are like, okay, that's too much. And I don't think I know what that is yet. So it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting. Now, what have we been doing so far? So this is, I'm recording this mid-January, actually in January 18th. So sort of towards the tail end of January, we've passed the middle. And Steph has been writing all of the scripts for

16:53the, for the lessons. She's designing the whole curriculum. It's kind of her wheelhouse. She's a curriculum designer. And mostly she did it in personal finance, but she's the one that wrote the books for the, for the pool care handbook, the hot to handbook those things. And she's writing all these lessons. Now, we probably have probably seven lessons done right now, like written. I've only recorded two. And I'm working with my brother right now to develop the editing style, because the editing style is going to be very different than our YouTube videos. But we don't know what that is yet. I have a vague idea on what we want. You know, I've recorded it. I'm presenting it differently. It's written differently. It's more bite-sized. And there's also some things, so like, I think by, well, so I'm recording this on a Sunday. And I've done, we're creating

17:53like scenes within our course so that we can reference them and say, hey, this is a, you know, text left screen. This is a text right screen. This is a B-roll screen. This is a A-roll screen, whatever it is, right? Or I should say scenes. So we're creating all of that. And I am trying, I'm sick this week, but next week I start recording again. We're hoping to have the course completely renovated by March. I told Steph, just keep pumping out scripts. And I'll just keep recording them. I got my brother editing it. I may have to help him with editing just to get some stuff done in time if things are slowing down. We're doing custom animations as well. We're doing like play-by-play style videos where we'll go through our B-roll, but then be able to circle and point to things and pause and, you know, kind of like football, you know, like if you, you know,

18:55reviewing plays and things like that. And giving out, giving out a lot of those as, as downloadables as well. It's creating those. So it's going to take a while and I think we'll start promoting it before it's like fully packed because I think, because once you buy it, you get all the new stuff too. And we'll continue to add to the course throughout the summer into the fall. And then probably by this time next year, it'll be like completely done. And then we'll have the webinars going in there, et cetera. Now the only thing, so there's like, there's a couple of things I mentioned. One is our onboarding sucks. So like, there's a bunch of content we're going to create that have nothing to do with the course itself, with the learning material, and more about like how to use the learning material. And then videos or emails that go out that drip out to get people to actually take the course

19:55downloaded, et cetera. Another thing we're toying with is making the course like incredibly large so that we could include lessons for professionals as well. So if we wanted to take the B2B route, which we're planning on doing, probably in the fall, we'll have, we'll be able to sell the course to professionals as well. So that'll be interesting. That'll be fun to do because that'll be a whole different like, that might be a couple of different modules that, you know, homeowners can just ignore, but professionals might want to take a look like, hey, this is specifically for you. This is like if you're trying to run a, you know, a pool business. And in that one, we might interview some like pool guy, you know, there could be a whole thing there. So that'll be, that'll be interesting to flesh out, but that's not in the plan for this year. Or that's not in the plan for finishing the course. We're just, we're targeting homeowners right now.

20:56And so there's going to be a lot of that, we have to do a lot of like onboarding emails. And I'm actually thinking, this is, this sucks, but I've been using Podia to host the course. And unfortunately, because I use Shopify to sell the course, and I'm not giving up on Shopify to sell the course, I still want to use Shopify. It's very useful to us. The problem, I'm like, my, my refrigerator is like buzzing. The problem is that we're also paying for Zapier. Every single time somebody buys a course, they get to get zapped from Shopify over in Podia. And so we're basically paying for two products, like two monthly subscriptions to solve one problem. And my, my, my instinct says that we need to move the course from Podia to think

22:02of it. And I know that there's so many other ones like Kajabi or teachable things like that. I think Kajabi is like the new game in town, right? The problem with Kajabi is, it's still an all in one platform similar to Podia. It's just like more robust. I don't want that. We have the checkout system. We just want the course system. We don't need extra shit. We want a learning platform. And think if it has the most robust learning platform. And it also happens to connect directly to Shopify. So it's probably what we're going to end up going with. The other thing about think that I like is it has API capabilities. Or I guess it has an API and single sign on, which means that if we end up, which is going to, which probably will happen this year, if we end up building

23:05our own account management system, because we want to create accounts for the app. And we want to be able to create accounts for our website. And for Shopify, I want to be able to also have people log into their course through the same management system. And we can only really do that with think ific. So it just seems like the right move. It's very, it's enterprise level stuff. But you know, we'll pay for thinkific and then not have to pay for Zapier, which will be fucking great. So that's it. Let me know you think. If you have any questions about it, I mean, I'm going to be working on it all year. So you're probably hear me talk about it a few times. But if you have any questions, shoot me an email or just go to jivinesi.com, G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-C-I.com. Subscribe to my free newsletter. I send one every single week, maybe sometimes two, three a week. But check it out. And then you can shoot me back in email. Let me know what you think and I'll talk to you next time.